Compositing Test

Coming from a film background before this module, After Effects was a piece of software that I was already quite familiar with. The only new things to me was the use of masks. For this shot, masking is key. We were all asked to mask out the building from the original shot so we were then able to replace the sky with another sky of our choice. At first we went around the building with only a few points but at a later stage it would need cleaning up by adding more points using the add pen tool to get a cleaner composite. We also added a reflection on the more reflective parts of the building of the new sky to make it fit in better. This was done by duplicating the sky image and then making it into a 3d layer. This allows you to change the perspective of the image so if we want to make it look like we are looking up at an angle at something, we would change the orientation to compensate this. The image's position needed to be changed twice for it to fit. At first it needed to be rotated anti-clockwise and then the top of the image needed to be pushed back and to give it more of an effect of it being tall with the top getting smaller.

We were then shown how to bring out the shininess of the reflective part of the building. It was a process of masking inside the first mask and then selecting the 'subtract' mode which would delete that part of the reflected image. We were then able to mask inside that mask to brin back the reflections on the windows. The mode would have to be on 'add' to bring the image back in, in the selected area.

As this was only just a test, we were asked to quickly go into Maya and model a really rough spaceship and render out some movement that would make the spaceship look like it was coming over the building. This was done by creating and looking through a camera and then inserting an image plane which would be a screen shot of the scene you are working with. I then positioned my camera at the correct angle to match the angle of the shot in the clip. To make the model look like it was moving I moved the camera more than I did the model. Just because that was the way I got along with best. I then rendered it out in maya, making sure the Alpha Channel was ticked so when the image sequence was dropped in as a layer in After Effects, the background would be transparent.